{"id":60,"date":"2008-10-08T16:47:31","date_gmt":"2008-10-08T21:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/consumermaven.wordpress.com\/?p=93"},"modified":"2023-12-28T17:04:31","modified_gmt":"2023-12-28T22:04:31","slug":"recoil-reduction-products","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/2008\/10\/recoil-reduction-products\/","title":{"rendered":"Recoil Reduction Products"},"content":{"rendered":"

I own two over-under field shotguns.\u00a0 These are light guns optimized for carrying on long walks hunting birds.\u00a0 But a lighter gun means heavier recoil.\u00a0 I like to take my field guns trap shooting, but it can be painful to shoot more than a few rounds with 12-gauge or even 20-gauge loads.<\/p>\n

Competitive shooters with customized guns and release triggers laugh at the idea of using field guns for sporting clays.\u00a0 “If you want less recoil you have to add more weight to the gun,” they insist.\u00a0 Adding weight is certainly one way to dampen recoil.\u00a0 But I’m a practical guy and I don’t want to turn my light field guns into heavy competition guns.<\/p>\n

Fortunately there are other ways to control recoil:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Fit<\/strong>.\u00a0 This is the primary factor affecting the shooting experience of a bird gun.\u00a0 If the gun doesn’t fit the shooter then the shooter won’t be able to maintain a correct shooting posture: Cheek “welded” to the stock, butt snugly in the shoulder pocket, and dominant eye aligned with the front sight bead.\u00a0 If you can’t lock the gun against your cheek and shoulder then the recoil of every shot will slap you (often leaving visible bruises).\u00a0 If your eye isn’t aligned with the sight then you will probably miss the target.\u00a0 (The shooter’s eye serves as the rear sight on a bird gun.\u00a0 It doesn’t take much sight movement to change the point of impact at 20-40 yards!)<\/li>\n
  2. Action<\/strong>.\u00a0 A semiautomatic action will absorb a significant amount of recoil.\u00a0 Of course that doesn’t help if you’re talking about making a bolt or break action easier to shoot.<\/li>\n
  3. Dampers<\/strong>.\u00a0 You can dissipate recoil energy using damping mechanisms.\u00a0 Almost every gun comes with a rudimentary damper in the form of a rubber recoil butt pad.\u00a0 Here I review some more advanced dampers.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Edwards Recoil Reducer<\/a><\/h3>\n

    Edwards Recoil Reducers<\/a> are light cylinders containing a spring-buffered counterweight that absorbs and even redirects (depending on installation angle) recoil.\u00a0 I got one delivered from Brownells<\/a> for $60.\u00a0 It looks and feels like a rugged device.\u00a0 Edwards has been making these for over forty years and backs each reducer with a lifetime warranty.<\/p>\n

    Installation in a wooden stock can be a bit of a project.\u00a0 Take the recoil pad off of any shotgun and you’ll discover a lot of empty space in the stock.\u00a0 Before you can properly install the reducer you probably need to fill that space with some combination of dowels or other wood trimmed for a tight fit.\u00a0 Then with a 7\/8″ forstner bit you can carefully drill out a hole as high and parallel to the gun’s barrel as possible.\u00a0 Push the recoil reducer into the hole, make sure it’s snug, and screw the recoil pad back on to hold it in place.<\/p>\n

    Installation in a hollow plastic stock is simply a matter of unscrewing the recoil pad, positioning the reducer, and filling the remaining space with sprayfoam, as shown here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    After installing the Edwards Recoil Reducer in one of my guns I took it right back to the trap field — still sore from shooting four rounds two days earlier.\u00a0 The recoil reduction was immediately obvious.\u00a0 I’m still working on a recoil gauge to quantify peak forces, but to me it felt like close to half of the recoil was gone.\u00a0 Even after four more rounds with the gun I would have been comfortable continuing to shoot.<\/p>\n

    Graco GraCoil<\/a><\/h3>\n

    Graco’s GraCoil<\/a> is a butt plate that contains an adjustable piston that compresses up to 5\/16″ to absorb recoil.\u00a0 Compression damping is also what a good recoil pad is supposed to do, but pads aren’t adjustable and they can’t get too mushy before they impact handling.\u00a0 The GraCoil spring can be tightened just enough that it doesn’t move under the pressure of your shooting stance, but then immediately starts to compress to absorb the recoil of a shot.<\/p>\n

    GraCoil plates also include a mechanism to enable significant adjustment to the position of the butt pad.\u00a0 This allows for significant improvements in the fit of a shotgun (which, as noted above, is an essential feature!).\u00a0 I opted to buy the GraCoil Model GC15-LP which also includes a length-of-pull adjustment.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>The GraCoil needs to be ground to fit a particular stock, something I didn’t feel like attempting.\u00a0 Total cost of the GC15LP with factory installation is $375.\u00a0 MPC Sports<\/a> will sell and install the same unit for $325.\u00a0 I went with the latter vendor.\u00a0 I carefully reviewed the proposed work with their gunsmith over Email and then mailed my stock to their shop in Atlanta.\u00a0 The completed piece was back in my hands just a week after they received it.<\/p>\n

    After tweaking the tension on the piston and getting the butt pad in just the right place shooting with the GraCoil is so easy and natural I really could break clays all day long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I own two over-under field shotguns.\u00a0 These are light guns optimized for carrying on long walks hunting birds.\u00a0 But a lighter gun means heavier recoil.\u00a0 I like to take my field guns trap shooting, but it can be painful to shoot more than a few rounds with 12-gauge or even 20-gauge loads. Competitive shooters with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[46,133],"tags":[3,16,17,21,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,41],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arms","category-ballistics","tag-absorb-recoil","tag-damp-recoil","tag-dampen-recoil","tag-gun-kick","tag-recoil-absorber","tag-recoil-absorbers","tag-recoil-control","tag-recoil-dampener","tag-recoil-dampeners","tag-recoil-reducer","tag-recoil-reducers","tag-reduce-recoil","tag-shotgun-recoil"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po3d1-Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1710,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/1710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}